


Roots

by ilgaksu



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Post-Civil War (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 05:03:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19370188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Wow,” says the checkout girl, “You sure look like that Captain America guy, you know?”“Yeah,” Steve says, “I get that a lot.





	Roots

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychicwaffles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychicwaffles/gifts).



The first thing thing Steve does, after everything, is he dyes his hair. He ducks into a Target - near enough to the airport terminal but not too far from the motel. It’s late at night and dark outside, turning the floor-to-ceiling windows into opaque eyes, transforming the bright hum of fluorescent lights and tannoy announcements into a weird, dizzy, liminal kind of space. He stands too long in the frozen foods aisle, staring at the glass cupboards and back into the gaze of his own semi-visible reflection - pale, tired, the dye box clutched in his hand - and it feels like a feedback loop.  

He should really get a basket. 

“Wow,” says the checkout girl, “You sure look like that Captain America guy, you know?”

There’s nothing suspicious in her voice, but dread trills down his spine, so he turns his smile up a few notches, the one that Bucky used to say looked like  _ butter wouldn’t melt in your damn mouth _ .  

“Yeah,” Steve says, “I get that a lot. That’s why -” He gestures at the hair dye a little helplessly, and she cracks up. “Right now, I just want to work without some random kid in the drive-thru calling down Stark on me.”  

“Don’t blame you,” she replies, “Fuck that noise. That’ll be $4.96, sir. You paying by cash or card today?”

The motel bathroom is tiny, and cramped, and has the kind of decor that went in and out of fashion before Steve came out of the ice - dead before he was ever rebirthed. Bucky probably remembers it. The style, that is. Maybe Steve’ll ask sometime. He remembers more now, but it’s in the details, speckled bits of flashback vomited back up by his brain, small and patchy: he remembers the texture of corduroy pants from thirty-five years ago, but not who they belonged to, and the way vinyl seats in diners used to stick to your skin in summer, but not the face of the waitress. Her name was Sheryl, he tells Steve absently. The nametag in absence of her eyes.

Steve reads the back of the box for the instructions, takes out the vinyl gloves and snaps them on. In the motel room next door, the couple who they saw checking in an hour before have progressed through fighting and into fucking, but the noises are pretty similar either way, almost-pain. The old light fittings make everything golden, pick out glints in Bucky’s hair, little shining flickers like distress flares on the other side of a great dark sea, colours that weren’t obvious to the naked eye on the day in the snow. Steve had forgotten they even existed. In his memory, Bucky has been sepia so long that to see him in colour is - 

He meets Bucky’s eyes in the mirror, where Bucky is laid out on the bed - turned onto his side to watch him, silent and inscrutable. Next door, someone moans. Bucky rolls his eyes. 

“Are you going to bang on the wall, or should I?” he asks after a moment. 

“Does it matter?” Steve replies. “They’re young. They’re not killing anyone.” 

“There you go. There you are. Still a bleeding heart,” and the look on Bucky’s face is strange, not one Steve can translate.

But he remembers where he’s seen it before. He remembers it from 1941, when Pearl Harbour erupted onto the national news, the war in Europe finally landed on their soil, when Steve had said, “I’m signing up, Buck. They’re going to need every man they can get,” and Bucky had pulled that face, taken a swig out of his bottle and said, “And they’ll be getting every other man going. You sure they need you as well?” and they’d fought about it something ugly the rest of the night. The next morning, Steve had woken up to go to class, and Bucky had been there at their poky little kitchen table, in their poky little kitchen, and he’d said, “Listen, I don’t want to fight with you, Stevie. If you really feel you ought to, then I guess you’re going to whether I like it or not, and I don’t want you going anywhere out there thinking I don’t have your back or something nonsensical like that, so -” 

In the present, Steve swallows up the feeling threatening its way up his throat and opens the dye bottle. The smell of peroxide stings. 

 

*

 

Three months later, Steve wakes up in Wakanda. It is dusk, the sky alight with violet. Afternoon has slipped past him and out the open door before he could notice. 

“You fell asleep,” Bucky tells him. He looks better, these days. The colour is back in his skin. It reminds Steve of sanitarium leaflets from doctor’s bags and his mother’s cough she tried to hide. You went away if you had the money for it, somewhere where they said the air was good for you. And Bucky went away. And they live in a future now where the kind of thing that killed his mother is toothless. And Bucky is healing.  

“Look at you,” he says, all the gold and red in his hair visible in the lamplight, sat down at the side of the sofa Steve is lying on. The years slide backwards and forwards with every blink, like calculations on an abacus. The smell of him, the weight of his hand in Stevie’s hair: those are the same. “Working yourself down to the bone all over again. You don’t change, do you?” 

“Old habits die hard, Buck,” Steve yawns into the cup of his own hand. Bucky strokes his hair some more and says nothing for a beat. 

“Your hair’s coming through again,” he says eventually, “At the roots. Right here.” He scratches at Steve’s scalp for emphasis. “You gotta pay attention to details like that, Stevie, if you’re out there running about. That’s the kind of stuff they teach you to remember.” 

“I only try and remember the important details,” Steve says, turns his head, kisses the inside of his wrist as punctuation. 

“Listen, if you’re gonna be like that, then I’ll just fix it for you,” Bucky says, but not before he rolls his eyes. “You only needed to have asked.” 


End file.
